Melbourne Writers Festival takes a new tack

By John Bailey

3 September 2018 — 1:55pm

Early in this year's Melbourne Writers Festival, New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum confessed that in the strange new landscape of the internet age, she doesn't quite understand what television even is any more. Much the same might be said of writers' festivals themselves, given the varying responses to artistic director Marieke Hardy's first program.

Ronan Farrow on stage at the Melbourne Writers Festival.Credit:Scott Limbrick

“The common thread from publishers seems to be that this is not a writers’ festival,” Melbourne University Press publisher Louise Adler told The Guardian. “This is a festival about performance and theatre and mourning one’s dead pet and people in search of a hug.”

Sources say that other publishers had privately expressed similar sentiments in the lead-up to Hardy's first festival, which was less focused on promoting their authors and drumming up sales. Theatre, music and other performance events featured heavily in the 2018 MWF line-up, leaving less space for novelists and memoirists to flog their wares.

The relationships between publishers and writers' festivals is a power struggle, and a program is typically not the hand-picked selection of exquisite minds you might expect. It is the result of bargaining, tantrums, miscommunication and financial pressure. You want this author? Find a space for that author and we might make it happen.

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But just as television looks remarkably different to what it did only a few decades ago, so is the writers' festival of yesteryear increasingly obsolete today. We don't have to wait until August to pick the brains of our finest word wranglers. Melbourne has a year-round equivalent in The Wheeler Centre. Authors frequently speak at bookshops large and small. Social media has made more of them more available than ever before, and we don't have to wait until their diaries are posthumously published to rake through their random thoughts and observations.

Hardy's program tried to acknowledge this need for a new kind of writers' festival, and it was done in a way that reflects her own background and interests. A co-founder of Women of Letters, it's unsurprising that she sought to have writers pen new work in response to particular prompts. Her involvement with secretive immersive theatre company The Boon Companions puts the performance events at the festival in perspective, too.

Melbourne Writers Festival artistic director Marieke Hardy.

The Animal Church in Flinders Street was a natural extension of her longstanding interest in animal welfare, and featured a surprisingly extensive roster of speakers exploring the relationships between humans and various animals. For anyone who doesn't care a whit about feathers, fur or fins, that's 28 festival sessions they might object to. But hearing Nobel laureate JM Coetzee reading a new short story was a festival highlight, and should be considered a good get for any festival director.

Elsewhere there were fake funerals and intimate concerts and a session for women in which audience members and speakers were naked. As expected, such programming drew criticism from some quarters. The Australian attempted to whip up some controversy late in the game, sniffing at “sessions about tattoos and pet meditation”. A interview with Tim Winton, who appeared at the festival, was headlined “Non-writers dumbing down festivals” in response to the author apparently decrying the state of writers' festivals today. The actual quotes from Winton didn't support that: “I'm sure some people feel they are being dumbed down,” he said. To the notion that there was an atmosphere of censorship and politeness, he ended by noting that “it sounds like a lot of First-World, white-person problems to me”.

The reality is that this year's festival featured some actual, honest to goodness writers whose inclusion should be considered a coup, and who might even have sold a few books while here. It was next to impossible to score a ticket to Ronan Farrow, one of the key journalists involved in the instigation of the #MeToo movement. His appearance at The Athenaeum was followed by Ta-Nahesi Coates, who ranks among the most dynamic and eloquent voices emerging from America today. This year's program also featured a substantial amount of new writing produced specifically for, and sometimes at, festival events.

Hardy's first festival might not have appealed to publishers accustomed to an older model, or those who write off great staggering swaths of human experience as “identity politics”, or someone who missed the days when you could catch Bryce Courtenay holding court, god rest his soul, and still be home in time for First Tuesday Book Club. But it did suggest that the notion of a writers' festival doesn't itself need to be consigned to history just yet.